We are in the grip of old habits. We assume, most of us, that when a prominent political figure is assassinated, the motive for the killing is political. So it was with Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Before anything was known about the killer, President Trump’s allies and outliers decided that it was a symptom of the murderous violence of soi-disant antifascists on the left. When it emerged, subsequently, that our man was from a republican family and that he potentially may have been part of the white supremacist ‘groyper’ movement, anti-Trump types chalked it up to the violence of the Right.
There may have been more justification for the latter position than the former. But it seems possible that looking at the murder through the lens of left and right misses the point altogether: that here, rather, isn’t politics so much as the grotesque nihilism of someone just riddled with internet brain-worms; someone who is prepared to take a stranger’s life and put an effective end to his own for no higher motive than being talked about on Reddit or 4chan.
This is more horrific even than it would be were the murderer an ideologue of one stripe or another
Look, after all, at the messages that the shooter inscribed on his ammunition casings. ‘Notices bulge’ is a meme from the ‘furry’ subculture. ‘If you read this you’re gay lmao’ is a standard-issue gaming insult. The string of arrows – initially interpreted by some as antifascist symbols – have since been identified as, of all things, the sequence of button-pushes used to drop a 500kg bomb in a game called Helldivers 2, which is a dark satire on the ‘managed democracy’ of a fascist state. And ‘Bella Ciao’ – originally an Italian antifascist anthem – has been recontextualised in gaming culture.
A man lies dead and the murderer leaves as his calling card, in other words, a jumbled string of internet in-jokes. That’s a sort of anti-politics. It’s so deeply marinated in irony that there’s no bottom to it at all. Murder ‘for teh lolz’. As long ago as the early 1990s, David Foster Wallace had warned that irony was becoming a corrosive force in public discourse, and he had no idea then how right he would turn out to be.
The internet turbo-charged the spread of a particular species of irony – not the species of irony that allows you to look at something from more than one point of view, but the species that absolves its user of believing in anything at all. Nothing is to be taken seriously: everything is available for ridicule. Sincerity is for normies. The currency of the internet is, after all, attention before it is anything else; the rhetorical default is trolling. Trolling isn’t about what you say, still less about what you mean: it’s about the reaction to it.
The dynamics of trolling, the corrosive nihilism of gaming culture, have spilt out into the real world. You can draw a line from the trolls of Gamergate to the rise of the alt-Right, from the cynical message boards 4chan and 8chan to the armies of Pepe the frogs who have given Trumpism its online character. ‘Liberal tears’ are the desideratum. Do they sincerely take an interest in the constitutional settlement of the US? If they do, they’d never tell you. It seems to me highly plausible, indeed, that the overt white supremacism and race-baiting and Nazi imagery to be found in these forums are attention-seeking more than they are ideologies. If you want to shock someone, use the n-word. Those who are shocked are the out-group; and those who snigger – you and your blackpilled message-board friends – are the in-group.
The terminally online, as the killing of Charlie Kirk shows in dramatic form, don’t always stay online. But when they come into the real world, they bring their acidically trivial habits of mind with them. That’s why I say this is an anti-politics. The real-world action isn’t about creating real-world change: it’s designed to feed back into the internet, to create more memes. We’ve already seen this with the mass murderer Elliot Rodger, who was subsequently hailed on incel forums as ‘the Supreme Gentleman’, and whose 2014 spree-killing ‘high score’ online trolls fantasised about topping. We see it, too, in the dehumanising habit of referring to people as ‘NPCs’.
So in some ways, this is more horrific even than it would be were the murderer an ideologue of one stripe or another. Because at bottom, here’s someone whose connection with the real world is so tenuous that, as I say, he seems to have taken a stranger’s life for no more serious reason than getting talked about on the Helldivers 2 subreddit. What level of nihilism does that imply? How brain-fried by the internet, how isolated, do you have to be to seek out a sense of belonging in a community of anonymous trolls at the cost of the whole rest of your life, to say nothing of someone else’s?
Young men like him are not, judging by the state of online discourse, in short supply these days. And that, ironically. is in the long run a problem for politics to solve.
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